WolfWalkers (2020)

WolfWalkers is another gorgeous animated film about humans and nature from the studio and director, Tomm Moore (this time with Ross Stewart) that made Song of the Sea and The Secret of Kells – they're both worth watching if you haven't seen them. WolfWalkers' lead character is a young English girl named Robyn Goodfellow. She's in Ireland with her dad, who is there to hunt wolves at the behest of a very severe Oliver Cromwell in the mid-17th century. The film is beautifully, dreamily drawn, occasionally letting us see characters partially drawn or only sketched and without color. This kind of meta approach works very well, and it adds to the obvious beauty and artistry of the film by repeatedly emphasizing that this film is hand-drawn.

You might be wondering about Robyn Goodfellow. She shares a name with the most important little puck from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, but she isn't the merry prankster from English lore or Shakespeare's play, at least not initially. She's a young girl who wants to be big and strong and just like her father. She is a very, very disobedient girl, though, and when she finally does start doing what her father tells her to do in act two, I was surprised. Wolfwalkers' connections to Robin Goodfellow, the medieval English sprite, are not totally clear. He was traditionally a kind of urban imp, who – as Shakespeare tells us early in the play – causes women to spill their beer and plays pranks on villagers ("I am that merry wanderer of the night"). But Shakespeare associates him instead with an Athenian forest and with his fairy band (an entirely different mythology); in Dream he works for Oberon, the king of the fairies, and plays his pranks on villagers and lovers in the forest instead of in the town. It make sense that Moore's little girl, Robyn, who causes plenty of trouble in the village would become a friend of the forest nymphs in WolfWalkers and cause plenty of trouble for the film's villain.

The villain in this film is Oliver Cromwell. He is even referred to several times by his nickname "Old Ironsides". He aims to control the forest and pagan belief in general with his Puritanism and his violence. Cromwell stands in here for illegitimate authority and he controls the villagers with lies, threats, and theatrics. And his aim is to destroy the forest, destroy paganism, and destroy the magic of nature. None of this is about what Cromwell believes. Cromwell is here to take power and to take it through violence. Moore's choice of such a famous historical figure as his villain is clearer if you remember that Cromwell is a hated figure in Ireland, responsible for English colonization of Ireland in 1649, and that Old Ironsides was personally responsible for many of the atrocities of this colonization. Moore plays a bit fast and loose with history here, but it's easy to read the film as a story about colonialism.

This film is also about queerness, I think. Werewolves are obviously queer figures – they're different at night than they are during the day (gay), they have a "nature" they try to hide and control but cannot (gay), and they must recruit new members not through reproduction in the standard human way but through conversion – also like gay people. WolfWalkers got me in my queer feelings. I think this was most evident for me in Robyn's repeated pleas to her father to listen to her, to hear her out, to believe her when she was talking; the feeling of being queer for me was echoed, too, in Robyn's father's refusal to believe what was right in front of his own eyes. No, it cannot be that; authority tells me that must be impossible, so I will believe authority rather than what I see and what my child tells me. Is there queer love in the film? Well, you can watch it and tell me what you think.

Mostly, though, WolfWalkers is about the magic that is all around us, especially in the animals and plants with which we share the planet. It's about listening to that world and looking at what it has to show us and learning from it. WolfWalkers is also just a gorgeous marvel of hand-drawn animation. I think it's Moore's best film to date, and I hope he'll keep making these beautiful fairytale films.

I watched WolfWalkers on AppleTV+ and I do not, frankly, understand why this platform exists. There is, as far as I can tell, no other new cinematic content. I looked and looked for other 2020 movies on this channel. I don't see any at all. Instead they have dozens and dozens of movies that you can buy. What? Why pay for a subscription service that requires me to pay more for the things I want? I'm paying only for the privilege to pay more? What is this? Audible? Anyway, you can do a free one-week trial of this channel and then cancel after you've watched WolfWalkers. That's what I'd recommend. If you do know where to find the movies on AppleTV+ please let me know.